THE BEGINNING OF LINE ENGRAVING AND ETCHING IN FRANCE AND
ENGLAND. FIRST ATTEMPTS AT MEZZOTINT. A GLANCE AT ENGRAVING IN
EUROPE BEFORE 1660.
The French were unable to distinguish themselves early in the art of
engraving, as the conditions under which they laboured were different
from those which obtained in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries:
the homes, all three of them, of schools of painting. From the
thirteenth century onwards, the architects and sculptors of France had
produced an unbroken succession of good things; but the origin of her
school of painting is not nearly so remote, nor has it such sustained
importance. Save for the unknown glass-painters of her cathedrals, for
the miniaturists who preceded and succeeded Jean Fouquet, and for the
artists in chalks whose work is touched with so peculiar a charm and so
delicate an originality, she can boast of no great painter before Jean
Cousin. And the art of engraving could scarcely have flourished when,
as yet, the art of painting had scarcely existed.
[Illustration: FIG. 69.--NOEL GARNIER.
Grotesques.]
[Illustration: FIG. 70.--JEAN DUVET.
The Power of Royalty.]
Wood-cutting, it is true, was practised in France with a certain
success, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, and even
a little before that. The "Danses macabres"--those aids to morality
so popular in mediæval times--the illustrated "Books of Hours," and
other compilations besides, printed with figures and tail-pieces, in
Lyons or Paris, give earnest of the unborn masterpieces of Geofroy
Tory, of Jean Cousin himself, and of sundry other draughtsmen and
wood-cutters of the reigns of François I. and Henri II. But, as
practised by goldsmiths, such as Jean Duvet and Étienne Delaune, and
by painters of the Fontainebleau school like René Boyvin and Geofroy
Dumonstier, line engraving and etching were still no more than a means
of popularising extravagant imitations of Italian work. The prints of
Nicolas Beatrizet, who had been the pupil of Agostino Musi at Rome, and
those of another engraver of Lorraine, whose name has been Italianised
into Niccolò della Casa, appear to have been produced with the one
object of deifying the spirit of sham, and converting French engravers
to that religion to which French painters had apostatised with so much
ill-fortune under the influence of the Italians brought in by Francis I.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.--ÉTIENNE DELAUNE.
Adam and Eve driven from Paradise.]
[Illustration: FIG. 72.--ÉTIENNE DELAUNE.
Mirror.]
[Illustration: FIG. 73.--ANDROUET DU CERCEAU.
Ornamented Vase.]
During the whole of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries the French school of engraving had neither method nor bent of
its own; but meanwhile it was a whim of fashion that every one should
handle the burin or the point. From the days of Henri II. to those of
Louis XIII., craftsman or layman, everybody practised engraving. There
were goldsmiths like Pierre Woeiriot, painters like Claude Corneille
and Jean de Gourmont, architects like Androuet du Cerceau; there
were noblemen; there were even ladies--as, for instance, Georgette
de Montenay, who dedicated to Jeanne d'Albret a collection of mottoes
and emblems, partly, it was said, of her own engraving. All the world
and his wife, in fact, were gouging wood and scraping copper. It
must be repeated that the prints of this time are for the most part
borrowed--are copies feeble or stilted, or both, of foreign originals.
Not until after some years of thraldom could the French engravers shake
off the yoke of Italian art, create a special style, and constitute
themselves a school. The revolution was prepared by Thomas de Leu and
Léonard Gaultier, engravers of portraits and of historical subjects;
but the hero of the French school is Jacques Callot.
There are certain names in the history of the arts which retain an
eternal odour of popularity; we remember them as those of men of
talent, who were also in some sort heroes of romance, and our interest
remains perennial. Jacques Callot is one of these. He is probably the
only French engraver[29] whose name is yet familiar to the general
public. That this is so is hardly the effect of his work, however
excellent: it is rather the result of his adventures; of his flight
from home in childhood; his wanderings with the gipsies; and the luck
he had--his good looks aiding--with the ladies of Rome, and even (it is
whispered) with the wife of Thomassin his master.
[Illustration: FIG. 74.--THOMAS DE LEU.
Henri IV.]
We have said it is Callot's merit to have lifted the French school of
engraving out of the rut in which it dragged, and to have opened for
it a new path. He did not, however, accomplish the work with an entire
independence, nor without some leanings towards that Italy in which
he had been trained. After working in Florence under Canta-Gallina,
whose freedom of style and fantastic taste could not but prove
irresistible to the future artist of Franca Trippa and Fritellino, he
had been obliged to return to Nancy. Thence he escaped a second time,
and thither was a second time brought back by his eldest brother, who
had been despatched in pursuit. A third journey took him to Rome; and
there, whether glad to be rid of him or weary of debate, his family let
him remain.
It is probable that during his expatriation,[30] Callot never so much
as dreamed of learning from the Old Masters; but he did not fail to
make a close study of certain contemporaries who were masters so
called. Paul V. was Pope; and the age of Raphael and Marc Antonio,
of Julius II. and Leo X., was for ever at an end. The enfeebling
eclecticism of the Carracci, and the profitless fecundity of Guido, had
given currency to all sorts of second-rate qualities, and in painting
had substituted prettiness for beauty. The result was an invasion of
frivolity, alike in manners and beliefs, which was destined to find its
least dubious expression in the works of Le Josépin, and later on in
those of an artist of kindred tastes with the Lorraine engraver--the
fantastical Salvator Rosa. When Callot settled in Rome in 1609, Le
Josépin had already reached the climax of fame and fortune; Salvator,
at an interval of nearly thirty years, was on the heels of his first
success. Coming, as he did, to take a place among the dexterous and the
eccentric, it seems that Callot could not have chosen a better time. It
was not long before he attracted attention; for when he left Rome for
Florence, where he produced some of his liveliest work, his name and
his capacity were already in repute.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.--CALLOT.
From the Set entitled "Balli di Sfessania."]
At Florence his capacity was perfected under the influence of Giulio
Parigi; and, thanks to the favour of Duke Cosmo II., which he easily
obtained, his name soon became famous in the world of fashion as
among connoisseurs. Unlike his countrymen, Claude Lorraine and the
noble Poussin, who, some years later, were in this same Italy to live
laborious and thoughtful lives, Callot freely followed his peculiar
vein, and saw in art no more than a means of amusement, in the people
about him only subjects for caricature, and in imaginative and even
religious subjects but a pretext for grotesque invention. Like another
French satirist, Mathurin Regnier, who had preceded him in Rome, he
was addicted to vulgar types, to rags and deformities, even to the
stigmata of debauchery. Thus, the works of both these two men, whom we
may compare together, too often breathe a most dishonourable atmosphere
of vice. With a frankness which goes the length of impudence, they give
full play to their taste for degradation and vile reality; and yet
their vigour of expression does not always degenerate into cynicism,
nor is the truth of their pictures always shameless. The fact is, both
had the secret of saying exactly enough to express their thoughts,
even when these were bred by the most capricious fancy. They may be
reproached with not caring to raise the standard of their work; but
it is impossible to deny them the merit of having painted ugliness
of every kind firmly and with elegant precision, nor that of having
given, each in his own language, a definite and truly national form to
that art of satire which had been hardly so much as rough-hewn in the
caricatures and pamphlets of the League.
[Illustration: FIG. 76.--J. CALLOT.
From the Set entitled "Les Gentilshommes".]
Etching, but little practised in Germany after the death of Dürer,
had found scarcely greater favour in Italy. As to the Dutch Little
Masters, spoken of in the preceding chapters, the time was not yet
come for most of their charming works. Claude Lorraine's etchings, now
so justly celebrated, were themselves of later date than Callot's.
The latter was, therefore, the real author of this class of work. In
his hand the needle acquired a lightness and boldness not presaged
in previous essays, which were at once coarse and careless. In his
suggestions of life in motion, he imitated the swift and lively gait
of the pencil, whilst his contours are touched with the severity of
the pen, if not of the burin itself. In a word, he gave his plates an
appearance of accuracy without destroying that look of improvisation
which is so necessary to work of the kind; in this way he decided the
nature and special conditions of etching. It was owing to his influence
that French art first attracted the attention of the Italians: Stefano
della Bella, Cantarini and even Canta-Gallina (who did not disdain to
copy the etchings of his old pupil), Castiglione the Genoese, and many
others, essayed, with more or less success, to appropriate the style
of the master of Nancy; and when he returned to establish himself in
France, where his reputation had preceded him, he found admirers, and
before long a still greater following of imitators.
[Illustration: FIG. 77.--J. CALLOT.
From the Set entitled "Les Gueux."]
He was presented to Louis XIII., who at once commissioned him to
engrave the "Siege of La Rochelle," and received at Court with
remarkable favour, which was, however, withdrawn some years later,
when he was bold enough to oppose the will of Richelieu. After the
taking of Nancy (1633) from the Duke of Lorraine, Callot's sovereign,
the great Cardinal, to immortalise the event, ordered the engraver to
make it the subject of a companion print to that of the "Siege of La
Rochelle," which he had just finished; but he was revolted by the idea
of using his talents for the humiliation of his prince, and replied to
Richelieu's messenger, "that he would rather cut off his thumb than
obey." The reply was not of a kind to maintain him in the good graces
of the Cardinal, and Callot felt it. He took leave of the king, and
soon after retired to his native town, where he died at the age of
forty-three.
Really introduced into France by Callot, etching had become the fashion
there. Abraham Bosse and Israel Silvestre helped to popularise it,
the latter by applying it to topography and architecture, the former
by using it for the illustration of religious and scientific books,
and the embellishment of the fans and other elegant knick-knacks then
selling in that "Galerie Dauphine du Palays" which is figured in one of
his prints, and from which a play of Corneille's derives its name. He
published besides an infinite number of subjects of all sorts: domestic
scenes, portraits, costumes, architectural ornaments, almost always
engraved from his own designs, and sometimes from those of the Norman
painter, Saint-Ygny.
[Illustration: FIG. 78.--CLAUDE LORRAINE.
"Le Bouvier."]
Abraham Bosse is doubtless a second-rate man, but he is far from having
no merit at all. He is an intelligent, if not a very delicate observer,
who knows how to impart to his figures and to the general aspect of a
scene an appearance of reality which is not altogether the truth, but
which comes very near to having its charm. He certainly possesses the
instinct of correct drawing, in default of refined taste and feeling;
and finally, to take him simply as an engraver, he has much of the bold
and firm handling of Callot, with something already of that cheerful
and thoroughly French cleverness which was destined to be more and more
developed in the national school of engraving, and to reach perfection
in the second half of the seventeenth century.
To Abraham Bosse are owing decided improvements in the construction of
printing-presses, the composition of varnishes, and all the practical
parts of the art; to him some technical studies are also due, the most
interesting of which, the "Traité des Manières de Graver sur l'Airain
par le Moyen des Eaux-fortes," is, if not the first, at least one of
the first books on engraving published in France. We may add that the
works of Abraham Bosse, like those of all other etchers of his time,
show a continual tendency to imitate with the needle the work of the
graver: a tendency worth remarking, though blamable in some respects,
as its result is to deprive each class of work of its peculiar
character, and from etching in particular to remove its appearance of
freedom and ease.
We have reached the moment when the French school of engraving entered
the path of progress, no more to depart from it, and when, after having
followed in the rear of foreign engravers, the French masters at
length began to make up with and almost to outdistance them. Before
proceeding, we must glance at the movement of those schools whose
beginnings we have already traced.
[Illustration: FIG. 79.--CLAUDE LORRAINE.
"Le Chevrier."]
The line of really great Italian painters went out with the sixteenth
century. Domenichino, indeed, Annibale Carracci, and a few others,
glorified the century that followed; but their works, although full
of sentiment, skill, and ability, are quite as much affected by the
pernicious eclecticism of the period and by the general decline in
taste. After them all the arts declined. Sculpture and architecture
became more and more degraded under the influence of Bernini and
Borromini. Athirst for novelty of any kind, people had gradually come
to think the most extravagant fancies clever. To bring the straight
line into greater disrepute, statues and bas-reliefs were tortured as
by a hurricane; attitudes, draperies, and even immovable accessories
were all perturbed and wavering. The engravers were no better than
the painters, sculptors, and architects. By dint of exaggerating the
idealistic creed, they had fallen into mere insanity; and in the midst
of this degradation of art, they aimed at nothing save excitement
and novelty, so that their invention was only shown in irregular
or overlengthy lines, and their impetuosity in bad drawing. Daily
wandering further from the paths of the masters, the Italian engravers
at last attained, through the abuse of method, a complete oblivion of
the essential conditions of their art; so that with few exceptions,
till the end of the eighteenth century, nothing is to be found save
barren sleight-of-hand in the works of that very school, which, in the
days of Marc Antonio and his pupils, had been universally triumphant.
[Illustration: FIG. 80.--ABRAHAM BOSSE.
From the Set entitled "Le Jardin de la Noblesse Française."]
After the Little Masters, inheritors of some of the genius, skill, and
renown of Albert Dürer, Germany had given birth to a fair number of
clever engravers, the majority of whom had left their country. Some
of them, indistinguishable to-day from the second generation of Marc
Antonio's disciples, had, as we said, abandoned the national style for
the Italian; others had settled in France or in the Low Countries. The
Thirty Years' War accomplished the ruin of German art, which before
long was represented only in Frankfort, where Matthew Mérian of Basle,
and his pupils, with certain engravers from neighbouring countries, had
taken refuge.
Whilst engraving was declining in Italy and Germany, the English school
was springing into being. Though at first of small importance, the
beginnings and early essays of the school are such as may hardly pass
without remark.
For some time England had seemed to take little part in the progress of
the fine arts in Europe, except commercially, or as the hostess of many
famous artists, from Holbein to Van Dyck. There were a certain number
of picture-dealers and print-sellers in London, but under Charles I.
her only painters and engravers of merit were foreigners.[31] The
famous portrait painter, Sir Peter Lely, whom the English are proud
to own, was a German, as was Kneller, who inherited his reputation,
and, as was Hollar, an engraver of unrivalled talent.[32] And while
a few pupils of this last artist were doing their best to imitate his
example, the taste for line engraving and etching, which processes were
being slowly and painfully popularised by their efforts, was suddenly
changed into a passion for another method, in which the principal
success of the English school has since been won.
Prince Rupert, so renowned for his courage and his romantic adventures,
had the fortunate chance to introduce to London the process of
engraving which is called mezzotint. In spite, however, of what has
been alleged, the honour of the invention is not his. Ludwig von
Siegen, a lieutenant-colonel in the service of the Landgrave of
Hesse-Cassel, had certainly discovered mezzotint before the end of
1642, for in the course of that year he published a print in this
style--the portrait of the Princess Amelia Elizabeth of Hesse--the
very first ever given to the public. Von Siegen for awhile refused to
divulge his secret. "There is not," he wrote to the Landgrave of Hesse
concerning this same portrait, "a single engraver, nor a single artist,
who knows how this work was done."
And, indeed, no one succeeded in finding out, and it was only after
a silence of twelve years that Von Siegen consented to reveal his
mystery. Prince Rupert, then at Brussels, was the first initiated. He,
in his turn, chose for confidant the painter Wallerant Vaillant, who
apparently did not think himself bound to strict silence, for, soon
afterwards, a number of Flemish engravers attempted the process. Once
made public, no one troubled about the man who had invented it. He was,
in fact, so quickly and completely forgotten, that even in 1656 Von
Siegen was obliged to claim the title, which no one any longer dreamed
of giving him, and to sign his works: "Von Siegen, the first and true
inventor of this kind of engraving." It was still worse in London
when the plates engraved by Prince Rupert were exhibited, and when
the English artists had learnt how they could produce the like. They
set themselves to work without looking out for any other models, and
were much more taken up with their own results than the history of the
discovery, the whole honour of which was attributed to Rupert, the man
who in reality had only made it public.
[Illustration: FIG. 81.--PRINCE RUPERT.
Head of a Young Man (engraved in Mezzotint).]
The talent of Rupert's first imitators, like that of the originator
himself, did not rise above mediocrity. Amongst their direct
successors, and the successors of these, there are few of much account;
but in the eighteenth century, when Sir Joshua Reynolds undertook,
like Rubens at Antwerp, to himself direct the work of engraving, the
number of good English mezzotint engravers became considerable. Earlom,
Ardell, Smith, Dickinson, Green, Watson, and many others deserving of
mention, greatly increased the resources of the process, by applying
it to the reproduction of the master's works. Mezzotint, at first
reserved for portraits, was used for subjects of every sort: flower
pieces, genre, even history; and step by step it attained to practical
perfection, of which, at the beginning of the present century, the
English still had the monopoly.
The methods of mezzotint differ completely from those of line engraving
and etching. With the graver and the needle the shadows and half-tones
are made out on copper by means of incised lines and touches; with the
mezzotint tool, on the contrary, the lights are produced by scraping,
the shadows by leaving intact the corresponding portions of the plate.
Instead of offering a flat, smooth surface, like the plates in line
engraving, a mezzotint copper must be first grained by a steel tool
(called the "rocker"), shaped like a chisel, with a semicircular blade
which is bevelled and toothed. Sometimes (and this is generally the
case in the present day) the "rocking" of the surface, on which the
engraver is to work, is produced, not by a tool, but by a special
machine.
When the drawing has been traced in the usual way on the prepared
plate, the grain produced by the rocker is rubbed down with the
burnisher wherever pure white or light tints are required. The parts
that are not flattened by the burnisher print as darks; and these darks
are all the deeper and more velvety as they result from the grain
itself--that is to say, from a general preparation specially adapted to
catch the ink--and are by no means composed, as in line engraving, of
furrows more or less crowded or cross-hatched.
Mezzotint engraving has, in this respect, the advantage of other
processes; in all others it is decidedly inferior. The rough grain
produced on a plate by the rocker, and the mere scraping by which
it is obliterated or modified, are technical hindrances to decided
drawing: only with graver or point is it possible to make outlines of
perfect accuracy. Again, precision, delicacy of modelling, and perfect
finish in detail are impossible to the scraper. Mezzotint, in fine,
is suitable for the translation of pictures where the light is scarce
and concentrated, but is powerless to render work quiet in aspect and
smooth in effect.
English engravers, then, had begun to rank as artists. Callot, and,
after him, other French engravers already remarkably skilful, had
succeeded in founding a school which was soon to be honoured by
the presence of true masters; Italy and Germany were deteriorating
steadily. Meanwhile, what was going on elsewhere? In Spain there
was a brilliant galaxy of painters, some of whom, like Ribera, have
left etchings; but there were few or no professional engravers. In
Switzerland, Jost Amman of Zurich (1539-1591) was succeeded by a
certain number of illustrator-engravers, heirs of his superficial
cleverness and of his commercial rather than artistic ideas: engravers,
by the way, who are commonly confounded with the German masters of the
same epoch. Lastly, the few Swedes or Poles who studied art, whether in
Flanders or Germany, never succeeded in popularising the taste for it
in their own countries; only for form's sake need they be mentioned.
The first of the two great phases of the history of engraving ends
about the middle of the seventeenth century. We have seen that the
influence of Marc Antonio, though combated at first by the influence
of Albert Dürer, easily conquered, and prevailed without a rival in
Italy, Germany, and even France, until the appearance of Callot and
his contemporaries. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries the art presented
a physiognomy of its own, developed slowly, and ended by undergoing
a thorough, but brief, transformation under the authority of Rubens.
The Flemish school was soon to be absorbed in that of France, and the
second period, which may be termed the French, to begin in the history
of engraving.
Were it permissible, on the authority of examples given elsewhere,
to compare a multitude of men separated by differences of epoch and
endowment, we might arrange the old engravers in the order adopted for
a group of much greater artists by the painters of the "Apotheosis of
Homer" and the "Hemicycle of the Palais des Beaux-Arts." Let us regard
them in our mind's eye as a master might figure them. In the centre is
Finiguerra, the father of the race; next to him, on the one side, are
the Master of 1466, Martin Schongauer, and Albert Dürer; on the other,
Mantegna and Marc Antonio, surrounded, like the three German masters,
by their disciples, amongst whom they maintain an attitude of command.
Between the two groups, but rather on the German side, is Lucas van
Leyden, first in place, as by right, among the Dutchmen. Below these
early masters, who wear upon their brows that expression of severity
which distinguishes their work, comes the excited crowd of daring
innovators, whose merit is in the spirit of their style--Bolswert,
Vorsterman, Pontius, Cornelius Visscher, Van Dalen, and their rivals.
Rembrandt muses apart, sombre, and as though shrouded in mystery.
Lastly, in the middle distance, are seen the merely clever engravers:
the Dutch Little Masters, Callot, Hollar, and Israel Silvestre.
If, on the other hand, we must abandon this realm of fancy for the
regions of fact, we might sum up the results of past progress by
instancing a few prints of perfect beauty. Our own selection would be
Mantegna's "Entombment;" Marc Antonio's "Massacre of the Innocents;"
the "Death of the Virgin," by Martin Schongauer; Dürer's "Melancholia;"
the "Calvary" of Lucas van Leyden; Rembrandt's "Christ Healing the
Sick;" Bolswert's "Crown of Thorns;" the "Portrait of Rubens," by Paul
Pontius, or the "Gellius de Bouma" of Cornelius Visscher; and finally,
Callot's "Florentine Fair," or "Garden at Nancy," and the "Bouvier,"
or, better still, the "Soleil Levant" of Claude Lorraine. Happy the
owner of this selection of masterpieces: the man who, better inspired
than the majority of his kind, has preferred a few gems to an overgrown
and unwieldy collection.